Nobody wrote down what Lee Harvey Oswald said during the many hours he sat under interrogation in the office of Dallas police Captain Will Fritz on November 22, 23 and 24, 1963. Nobody turned on a tape recorder or called in a stenographer. So most of what playwright Dennis Richard…

Playwright Dennis Richard leaves it up to the audience to argue conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination. His play, Oswald: The Actual Interrogation, onstage in its regional premiere at Casa Manana Fort Worth November 9-17, just sticks to the facts. Or as many as Richard could find about the hours…

Maxine is a well-to-do old widow living out her last days in a nice nursing home. Or is she dying a little sooner than she should be? She thinks so. Maxine believes her demise is being hastened by her inheritance-hungry daughter, who’s in cahoots with the Haitian nurse, Tina. Deadline…

“Do you really cut into someone’s arm during the show?” Dallas-based playwright and performer Brad McEntire hears this question after almost every performance of his kinky solo show Chop. “An uncomfortable number of times, actually,” he says. Since premiering at WaterTower Theatre’s Out of the Loop Fringe Festival in 2010,…

We’re lucky that some of the great American dramas have graced Dallas stages in recent seasons. To Kill a Mockingbird, Inherit the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath all feature leading characters with a conscience, and they explore with great literary style important themes about justice and enlightenment of the…

The material has promise, but the production of TeCo Theatrical’s latest at the Bishop Arts Theatre, Black at the Assassination, doesn’t do it any justice. And justice is what this new play by Dallas writers Kyadal Robertson and Camika Spencer is all about. Connected by one event, the assassination of…

Plasmatically speaking, let’s give the new musical Fire and Blood, making its debut at Richland College, a B-negative. It’s a big, ambitious mess of a show, with book and lyrics by Richland drama prof Andy Long (who also directed) and music by Dallas composer and musical director Adam C. Wright…

Put some masterminds together and you’re bound to ignite sparks of creative genius. Ochre House’s Matthew Posey and flamenco artist Delilah Muse both have been awardees in the Observer’s annual Masterminds round-up. Dancer Danielle Georgiou was a runner-up this year. You can experience the trio’s latest artistic collaboration this week…

Clybourne Park is the second great major American drama about the hell of dealing with a homeowners’ association. The first was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Clybourne’s source material from half a century ago. Both shows are running at Dallas Theater Center (at the Wyly Theatre), sharing cast…

Long regarded as a commentary on the nuclear panic of the Cold War, Samuel Beckett’s 1961 absurdist comedy Happy Days now seems more like a cartoon of a long, rotten marriage. Wingspan Theatre Company is doing the play right now at the Bath House. Director Susan Sargeant amps up the…

Outside of Dallas, too many people think there’s no great theater happening inside of Dallas. We know better. Besides the giant venues with the name of a telecommunications giant attached to them, there are a bunch of more interesting, smaller playhouses where local actors, directors and playwrights are putting new…

It does feel weird to applaud after John Wilkes Booth sings about shooting President Lincoln in the opening scene of Assassins, the 1990 Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical now playing at Theatre Three. But damn, actor Gregory Lush is so matinee-idol handsome as Booth, and his performance of “The Ballad of…

Two things could happen for Jeff Swearingen at his low-budget Fun House Theatre in Plano. He’ll either get one of those MacArthur “genius grants” for his innovative and boldly un-P.C. approach to children’s theater or the parents of Plano will form an angry mob wielding torches and pitchforks and run…

There’s hardly anything more enjoyable in live theater in this town than watching Kitchen Dog’s leading lady Tina Parker perform an onstage emotional meltdown. In her latest role, co-starring in Lisa D’Amour’s dark comedy Detroit, Parker is in maximum meltdown mode playing Mary, a nervous paralegal married to gangly laid-off…

Peter Pan not only won’t grow up, he just won’t go away. We’ve had Cathy Rigby flying around as the little green elf for about half a century on national tours. More recently Dallas Theater Center’s new musical Fly let a young boy play the role in about as depressing…

As a big, important American classic, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun deserves every bit of the respect and care it’s getting in Dallas Theater Center’s latest staging (the third in the company’s history) at the Wyly Theatre. What a beautiful production, every moment crafted for maximum impact. An…

Recycling is a big theme with Peter and the Starcatcher, the Tony-winning play onstage at the Winspear Opera House through September 29. This “prequel” recycles the story of Peter Pan, Wendy, the Lost Boys and Captain Hook – yeah, we’re a little tired of that crowd, too. But it puts…

Undermain Theatre is presenting the world premiere of East Coast playwright Sylvan Oswald’s Profanity, directed by Katherine Owens. The title could serve as a warning, for you will curse Undermain for choosing to produce this unremarkable drama and curse yourself if you’ve already bought tickets to it. It’s a damn…

Prolific Dallas playwright Jonathon Norton has a new one called Homeschooled, directed by Regina Washington at African American Repertory Theatre in DeSoto. At 85 minutes, it’s the right length for the play’s extended bouts of angst among three women at odds over how to teach the most violent episodes in…

Silly and surreal, Matt & Ben says out loud what some have long suspected: that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had help writing Good Will Hunting, the script that earned them Oscars and launched them into Hollywood superstardom. How’d that screenplay fall into the laps of the barely known young…

“Welcome to Luby’s. Salad fer you?” drawls actor Paul J. Williams, playing one of a cafeteria full of characters in his gently tossed solo comedy Dishing It Out. Williams’ show is at the top of the menu for Uptown Players’ annual smorgasbord of short plays for the two-weekend Pride Performing…